wild at heart beginning of chapter quotes

A number of beginnings – the start of a new day, the birth of a new life – are present in this poem which offers a vision of the child as a ‘new statue’.

In this poem we have Plath’s speaker (based on Plath, herself a mother to a small child when she penned this poem) stumbling out of bed ‘cow-heavy and floral’ in her Victorian nightgown to attend to her new-born child. ‘In the beginning’: these three words begin each of the four stanzas that make up this poem by Dylan Thomas, which consider the grand and cosmological (the ‘star’), the earthly power of the elements (‘fire’), the message of God (‘the word’, reminding us of the beginning of another book of the Bible, the Gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word’), and human brain-power. The poem meditates on origins and beginnings of various kinds, taking in the origins of English rural communities and the poet’s own origins through the generations and centuries. And indeed, the poem sees Eliot visiting the place where he ‘began’, genealogically speaking: the small Somerset village of East Coker was where his ancestors lived.

Wild at heart beginning of chapter quotes